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About Máirín Duffy

Máirín is a principal interaction designer at Red Hat. She is passionate about software freedom and free & open source tools, particularly in the creative domain: her favorite application is Inkscape. You can read more from Máirín on her blog at blog.linuxgrrl.com.

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17 thoughts on “Translating Japanese”

Babelfish

Actually, Babelfish has an attempt at translating Japanese these days, Google Translate has it too (marked BETA). The quality of the translations is pretty lacking though. (I don’t speak any Japanese and even I notice the quality is terrible.😉 )

Hmm, trying to use a romanji text in the translation does not help much? Fortunately Fedora has SCIM where I wrote either hiragana and katakana text. Kanji is a bit challenge although I am very able to write. Now that I think about it, I should return to retake Japanese class. Speaking is not a problem but writing require a lot of practice.

Hmm, trying to use a romanji text in the translation does not help much? Fortunately Fedora has SCIM where I wrote either hiragana and katakana text. Kanji is a bit challenge although I am very able to write. Now that I think about it, I should return to retake Japanese class. Speaking is not a problem but writing require a lot of practice.

That’s pretty cool, though it’s only (heh) Japanese text -> English text. I’d also like some way to figure out pronunciation; I’m listening to the japanesepod101.com lessons so I’m building up the Japanese sound < -> meaning mapping but I have no clue how to read or write anything.

I can go read German or Turkish websites and since I know the ~25 letters in their alphabet (which looks remarkably similar to my own!) I can pronounce any word in the language. With Japanese it’s all “squiggle that goes this way, then over there, with the boxy shape up there…” to me. 🙂

oh Japanese pronunciation is pretty straightforward i think – then again i have ~2+ years instruction under a native speaker lol. but ive found watching japanese tv shows from time to time, you hear and remember the pronunciations if you’ve heard them enough.

if you know the Japanese hiragana and katakana (i think ~47 characters in each) then you’ll be able to pronounce most things that aren’t in kanji – the hiragana and katakana are phonetic alphabets. Kanji are a bit more complicated🙂 but they are not difficult to look up.